Swimming in the Moon: A Novel (8 page)

“Mamma, it’s only a talent show.”

“Good. Then people will say, ‘Lucia D’Angelo is the best talent.’ ”

“But how do you know all this?”

“I don’t. I only know what’s better than ta-
dum,
ta-
dum,
ta-
dum
. Again, from the beginning.” I did. She listened intently, slowing me on a line, shaking her head if the “ta-
dum
” came back. “Again.” And now the full smile, her hand patting my face. “Good, Lucia, very good.” My chest swelled with pleasure.

Soon after, a scuttling wind reminded us that we still had the week’s laundry to do. We packed our basket and scrambled onto the next streetcar before realizing that we’d taken the wrong line, going away from home. I asked a young girl who looked Italian for help.

“You have to change at University Circle. Don’t you know that? Are you greenhorns?” She told us how many stops until our change and flounced away.

“Little bitch,” Mamma snapped. Getting off at the fifth stop, I nearly dropped our basket. Young people barely older than I were strolling past with books. Couples sat talking on benches, as if this were their work for the afternoon. I stared like a beggar outside a bakery. A professor spoke with two women,
spoke with them,
discussing a point.

“See,” I said. “Western Reserve University. Miss Miller told us about it.”

Mamma studied the scene. “They’re blond, and they don’t look Italian. See how they walk, like rich people? You wouldn’t like it here,” Her work-roughened hand patted mine. But that night I unfolded my memory like a letter, studying it again. Yes, they were American and rich, but inside, inside, were they so different from me? They had finished high school; that was their first step.

The next Saturday I climbed onstage at the talent show and recited my poem. “Look at each group in the audience until someone blinks. That’s what street singers do,” Mamma had reminded me. I remembered each word and place for breath. I looked out at the faces until one in each group blinked. Even Irena had come, taking a break from her buttons. She smiled steadily at me as if each word were a gift.

I won the recitation prize and a gold-stamped book from Mr. Printz of the Printz-Biederman Company. Great things in America seemed possible that night: learning English perfectly, graduating from high school, even going to college. Look at Mr. Printz, who came to America with nearly nothing, Miss Miller had said, and made a fortune selling coats and dresses.

Two Hungarians played a violin duet; Polish girls danced, and Bulgarian brothers did acrobatics. Henryk passed balls to a friend who juggled with no particular skill but great good humor, both taking such extravagant bows for the modest performance that everyone laughed. At the end of the evening, when Miss Miller asked if anyone else wished to perform, Mamma suddenly stood by her chair, opened her mouth, and began “Maria Marì.”

Silence spread across the room. Even those who didn’t know the words sat transfixed. American women setting out cookies and cider stood still to listen. A lamp shone over Mamma’s head. She moved toward the light until her shoulders dripped with gold. Italians closed their eyes, smiling. Pride filled me like a bucket overflowing.

After the last notes glided away, it was Henryk who began clapping first. Then Umberto and I, Irena, Yolanda, Miss Miller, Mr. Printz, and soon the whole room filled with beating, whistling, and stamping of feet.

I hugged her. “You were wonderful, Mamma. Everyone loved you.”

“And
he
wasn’t there.”

Was she at last joking about the maestro? “No,” I said carefully, “he wasn’t. And look at my book. Isn’t it lovely?”

“Yes, but don’t start reading tonight. It’s late.”

We walked slowly, for Irena was tired. Others going home greeted Mamma as if she were a diva.
“Brava!”
they cried, or words in their own language.

“They’re just greenhorns,” she said, but her face was flushed.

T
APPING AT THE
W
INDOW

After her success
at Hiram House, Mamma began racing through dinner to sit at the player piano and sing. Roseanne was pleased. Enjoying the free entertainment, her two Hungarians went less often to Lula’s, a lively tavern nearby; they saved money and paid rent regularly. Donato, who clerked at a men’s hat and glove store, enjoyed the evenings too and ceased looking for new lodgings. Even Irena came downstairs to finish the last of her buttons for the day.

But singing wedged me away from my mother. Music filled the hours I needed for homework. Our bedroom was cold and dim, so I studied in the dining room, fingers pressed into my ears. “You’re becoming a hermit,” Roseanne declared. Mamma was offended and mystified that I ignored her for a puddle of books. “You’re at school all day. Isn’t that enough?” If Irena braced a chair with cushions and we made buttons in the dining room after I’d finished my homework, Mamma grumbled that I liked buttons more than music.

Our debt to Countess Elisabetta came between us too. She’d given us twenty-four dollars for the passage and another thirty we’d used for clothes, shoes, and school supplies. At first Mamma had grudgingly saved fifty cents a week in our little bank. Now, with piano rolls from Brainard’s music store at thirty cents each, our savings were leaching away. Her shoes needed half soles. I needed a doctor when hot olive oil wouldn’t cure my earache. Mamma craved Italian sweets and salt-cured olives from Catalano’s. How could I object when she worked so hard to keep me in school? But we weren’t repaying the loan. After three weeks of putting nothing in the bank, we had a furious argument in our room, fought in whispers since Donato slept next door.

“Why
must
we pay back the countess?” Mamma demanded. “She doesn’t need it, and we slaved for years cleaning that old palazzo. How often did we scrub those steps?”

“But when we had to leave Naples—”

“That wasn’t our fault.”

“She helped us,” I persisted. “She got our documents. Didn’t you say that when I was born, the count didn’t want me? She let me stay. She taught me to read.”

“Right, she taught
you
.
You
were the little pet, remember?”

“But she protected
us
.”

“I cured her headaches
and
cleaned her house. So she got her pay.” My mother turned to the wall, humming loudly.

Furious, I dragged my chair to the drafty window, glaring out into the night. Yet it was true that the countess favored me, sometimes calling me from work to read to her. She gave me easy tasks on hot days. She took me walking by the sea after the count’s rages and worst abuses. “My little shadow,” she called me. It’s true I was bound to her for reasons that Mamma couldn’t share. This debt tormented me, even if a pair of fine Venetian goblets in our rosewood cabinet cost more than the paltry sum we owed.
Our
rosewood cabinet? Mamma was right; nothing in the villa was ours.

We barely spoke the next day. I tried to see our past through her eyes, remembering that dark memories gnawed at her. Yet nothing prepared me for what she revealed a few nights later. Again we were whispering, and her words cut like tiny knives: “You cried all the time when you were a baby. I couldn’t make you stop. The count said, ‘Give it away if it won’t stop screaming.’ But when
she
picked you up, with her soft hands and French perfume, you smiled. She called me to see. I’d been scrubbing floors. When could I play with you?”

I had to ask: “Mamma, did
you
ever want to give me away, to have me exposed in an orphanage?”

She flicked at the peeling wallpaper. “Not to an orphanage, but when you were four months old, a friend of the countess came from Rome. She had no children and wanted you. She said she’d give me thirty-five lire and a new dress. She’d call you Flavia, like her dead sister. You smiled. She had an ugly voice and a pinched, rich woman’s face, but you smiled at her.”

The dark square of our window tunneled out to another life. I was no longer Lucia of Naples but Flavia of Rome, a rich woman’s daughter. Sold for thirty-five lire. “I said I needed a day to think about it,” the piercing whisper continued.

“What did you— How did you think about it?” I lay rigid, barely breathing, as if her choice hadn’t happened yet and some stray movement now would hurl me to Rome.

A warm hand touched my face. “You cried all night and the count came twice to scream at me. In the morning, I washed and dressed you, but when I heard that lady at the door, I couldn’t bear to think of you living with that voice and nasty face. Who did she think she was with her thirty-five lire and new dress? I put a pin in your diaper so you’d scream when she held you. When you did scream, I said she couldn’t have you. I ran with you to the kitchen and took out the pin. You were
mine,
” she finished fiercely. “I held you all that night and you didn’t cry.” She held me tightly again.

“Mamma, did you ever—were you ever—”

“No!” she said, driving her fingers in my hair. “I was
never
sorry about that pin. Never, never! Don’t think that.” How could I not? I had been dangled over a precipice. Yes, I’d been retrieved, but I
had
been dangled.

“Lucia, I was your age, almost a child. I’d had hard times all my life.”

That was true, true. How could I manage my life now with a screaming baby? Could I blame her? Judge her? She worked early and late to keep me in school. We were woven together as tightly as the braid of her thick black hair. Yet years later, memories of that pin still jab me. Despite every voice that tells me yes, I wonder: have I been as faithful to her as she was to me?

“As for the debt,” she said briskly, “you can agree or not, but I won’t pay back the countess now.” She yawned, turned over, and went to sleep.

Debt. Think of the debt. Not—the other. She
didn’t
give me away. She kept me. Think of the debt.
If we didn’t repay it, I’d be ashamed. I couldn’t write to the countess and if I didn’t write, how would I receive her comforting letters of praise and encouragement? Who could help me with this trouble? Roseanne would discount any debt that put our rent at risk. Irena, so honest and frugal, would not understand Mamma’s need for small indulgences. Yolanda? With twin brothers, a sister, parents, and a crippled aunt crowded together and constantly fighting, she yearned for escape. “If you have any extra money,” she’d say, “buy a new dress so fellas will notice you and take you out at night.”

In the end, I went to Miss Miller, who patiently helped me express my troubles in English. “It seems to me, Lucia,” she said, “that if you earned some money of your own,
you
could pay back this debt.”

“But if I work in a factory—”

“Not factory work. You can write Italian?” I nodded. “Some immigrants can’t, and they want to send letters home. So they come here on Sundays and dictate to scribes. We keep the price low, but you do make something. Would you like to scribe?”

Yes, I said happily. That Sunday I sat with a long line of scribes writing in Russian, Yiddish, Polish, Czech, Slovenian, Hungarian, Italian, and German. Soon I was looking forward to each week’s drama of other lives.

I wrote of jobs found, shops bought or enlarged, moves to new and better flats, marriages and engagements, the triumphs of children. I announced money being sent home for a family’s passage to America or to buy land or houses in Italy. Sometimes I wrote anguished excuses: the promised funds weren’t coming because of a job lost, sickness, injury, or death. “I had almost paid for my sewing machine,” said one woman, “but it burned in a fire so I have to start over.”

“Dearest Mamma,” a hoarse voice would manage, and I knew to put down my pen and wait. I saw men and women convulse in sobs for the death of a child, crippling accidents to the breadwinner, or hoarded savings gone. A young widower awkwardly held a tiny baby; his wife had died in childbirth. How to speak of that tangle of blessing and loss? He couldn’t care for the babe alone, but how could he give their son away or find a new wife with his heart so full of Maria? He doubled over my desk, stammering excuses to those behind him in line. Strangers reached to touch him. “Take your time,” they said. “Don’t think about us.”

I saw subterfuge as well. A young woman described a happy married life when everyone knew her handsome husband had run off with an American shopgirl.

“Papa, I’m working at the mill,” said a young man horribly crippled in the limestone quarries. In fact, all his children worked now; the littlest shined shoes.

“Next month I’ll send a fine dowry to my beloved little sister,” a notorious gambler had me write as those behind him coughed and glared.

My pay was low, but with many letters, I could soon begin sending my own money to the countess. “Do you feel better now?” Miss Miller asked. I told her yes, much better. In my third week, I noticed Henryk among the scribes.

His line moved more slowly than mine, but with jostling good humor. Buying vegetables for Roseanne at his father’s shop, I’d noticed his easy manners with those who defended their pennies by insulting his goods. “My poor honest onions,” he’d lament and make the women laugh.

We began walking home together, sharing stories we’d written. “I know your gambler,” Henryk said. “He wanted to bet me which potato would roll off a cart first.” We talked about how many people would read our letters “back there,” how they’d become like holy relics.

“But they aren’t our words,” I mused. “We’re just scribing.”

“What would you write if they
were
your words?” No one had ever asked me such a question. With a patient smile he snapped off a maple twig and studied it as we walked.

“Maybe I’d write about them, how their lives could be better.” I paused. “And you?”

“Well—” he began, but then we were both caught by a pigeon strutting past us with a slice of bread hung around its neck, calmly pecking at his dinner. “Dear Papa Pigeon,” Henryk began. “America is wonderful. You can even eat your jacket.”